Are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core fundamentally sound?

[Wiktor Rzeczkowski]

I did some testing of RHEL v.4 U4 AS, FC3, FC5 and FC6 and seem to have 
been finding that, soon after a fresh installation of the OS on a 
non-networked machine, many files were automatically changing. I also seem 
to have been finding that some time after package update, the files were 
automatically changing again.

/bin/ls is one of the files that were changing. The file is part of 
coreutils package. The following are MD5 checksums for /bin/ls on the 
specified RHEL and FC systems immediately after installation of the 
specified coreutils package (current version). The checksums are computed 
by 'md5sum /bin/ls' and the versions of OS and of coreutils are displayed 
by 'cat /etc/redhat-release' and 'rpm -q coreutils' (no quotes), 
respectively.


Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 4)
coreutils-5.2.1-31.4
28da135a9636fbeceb8d1af74d1e16df  /bin/ls

Fedora Core release 3 (Heidelberg)
coreutils-5.2.1-31
135e01367fa7ec42ab2ff5eba1d42418  /bin/ls

Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux)
coreutils-5.97-1.2
94b3a4c00dcd359826663c6ebd6f4a42  /bin/ls

Fedora Core release 6 (Zod)
coreutils-5.97-12.3.fc6
cc34b0ed1873a94301c511cab1459faa  /bin/ls


Does anyone get the above MD5 checksum for /bin/ls now, one or more days 
after installation of the respective coreutils package on the respective 
OS or does everyone get a different checksum?


Wiktor